Gun buy-back to cost up to $200 million

The Government has banned semiautomatic rifles for private use, and gunowners will now experience an Australian-style gun buyback scheme.

The move had been expected for several days, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has promised fair compensation for gunowners.

Economist Bryce Wilkinson from the New Zealand Initiative says the convention is for the government to compensate people when it requires them to surrender property.

Bill O’Leary from the Deerstalkers Association believes paying anything less than the normal market price for weapons surrendered would be unfair.

‘‘Firearms are property, and the people who hold them bought them in good faith,’’ he says. ‘‘People should be compensated financially.’’

Australian ban

Banning the ownership of rapid-fire semi-automatic rifles, except for a limited number of uses, mirrors the move made by Australia in 1996. Australia didn’t completely ban semiautomatic rifles and shotguns following the Port Arthur massacre of 35 people in 1996, but moved quickly to limit their ownership to people who needed them for work.

At the same time Australia tightened up gun licence background checks, required ‘‘genuine reasons’’ for having a licence, set high standards for gun storage, ended the sale of any gun except by a licensed dealer, and required people get a permit for each gun they wanted to buy.

The national gun buy-back in 1997 was funded through a Medicare levy.

It compensated gunowners for the weapons they had to hand in, with the compensation also seen as necessary to encourage them to comply with the new laws.

Gun-owners were paid just over A$300 million (NZ$309m), according to the Australian auditor-general, though the taxpayer had to also foot the costly bill for administering the scheme, and paying some compensation to gun business owners for loss of business.

Buy-back mistakes

While it was effective, resulting in more than 640,000 firearms being surrendered, the Australian buy-back wasn’t the most efficient process, with Australian taxpayers paying A$7.5m for guns and gunparts not included in the law governing the buy-back.

That included the taxpayer buying completely legal guns, and antiques firearms. Taxpayers even ended up paying for weapons that were already illegal, including aircraft cannons, mortars, grenade launchers, and anti-tank weapons.

Compensation varied from state to state at times for the same kinds of weapons, the Australian auditorgeneral found.

In 2003, Australia organised a second gun buyback, this time for handguns.

It was similar, but better organised, but there was a difference, as it did not pay gun businesses compensation for loss of trade.

Ardern has signalled those mistakes will not be made here, and gun dealers will be expected to return banned weapons to their suppliers.

Fair prices

O’Leary says ‘‘fair’’ compensation means paying market price.

But the day a ban is announced, the normal market disappears, and the day after a ban comes into effect, there is no market at all, except the black market on which prices could be expected to rise rapidly.

Some of the black market guns in private hands come from burglaries at gunowners’ homes, and restricting supply led to prices for illicit weapons rising in Australia.

O’Leary believes the price the Government should pay for each weapon would have to be its pre-ban price.

Nicole McKee, from gunowner lobby group Council of Licensed Firearms Owners, says compensation in any buy-back should be at today’s market value of the item, not the value after the firearms were banned, because their value would drop.

In a buy-back, owners should also get paid for all the gun accessories they no longer needed, such as magazines, gun-bags and ammunition, McKee says.

It could also include silencers and night-vision scopes, both of which are legal in New Zealand as well, both being popular with hunters.

Calculating compensation

O’Leary says compensation in a fair buy-back should be struck by negotiation between the Government and each owner individually.

‘‘It would mean every firearm would have to sit on a table, and on one side would be the person from the Government and on the other would be the owner.’’

But Wilkinson says a gun buy-back would have to be efficient, and cost-effective, which could rule out such negotiations, requiring another mechanism for setting prices.

Cost of switching weapon

O’Leary says even if people got a fair price for their guns in a buy-back, they would still end up out of pocket.

In Australia many gunowners decided not to buy a new weapon but many switched to hunting or sports-shooting with a firearm that was still legal.

But if Kiwi gun owners get a market price for their older, used gun, many will find it is not enough to buy new weapons.

‘‘I can guarantee they would be considerably out of pocket,’’ O’Leary says.

Total cost

It is hard to know what the taxpayer will have to stump up to buy back semiautomatic weapons.

The Australians didn’t when they embarked on their gun buy-backs.

The best estimate of the total number of firearms owned by New Zealanders is about 1.5 million.

A political consultant who has advised the gun lobby, Simon Lusk, says there are an estimated 19,000 militarystyle semi-automatic weapons in New Zealand.

The cost of buying back banned weapons could be between $100m and $200m.

Money well spent?

The Council of Licensed Firearms Owners does not believe Australians got value for money, and have urged against tightening gun laws here before a through investigation. The council ‘‘will support our Government and police policy on any legislative changes that are well investigated, have gone through due process and will be effective in reducing the likelihood of a similar terrorist attack occurring in our country again’’, McKee said.

The council’s website claims the tightening of Australia’s gun laws changed nothing, and that gun crime was falling even before the Port Arthur massacre.

New Zealand has had a similar, slightly higher, level of homicide to Australia, according to the OECD Better Lives index of nations, despite its weaker gun laws that appear to have played a part in why the Australian man charged with the murder of 50 people in Christchurch chose this country, and not his homeland, for his attack.

Researchers have made competing claims for the efficacy of Australian gun controls. The Harvard Injury Control Research Centre concluded in 2011 that Australia ‘‘seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved. While 13 gun massacres (the killing of four or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the National Firearms Agreement, resulting in more than 100 deaths, in the following 14 years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres’’.

In 2017, the University of Pennsylvania published more up-to-date findings, which agreed with the Harvard study. Epidemiologic Review in 2016 did a study of gun control studies, and found a lot of biased research, paid for by pro and anti-gun lobby groups.

Illegal weapons

There remain massive numbers of guns owned illegally in Australia, though no-one knows how many.

Wilkinson says a buy-back here would not result in criminals handing in their guns. ‘‘It will get a response from law-abiding people and the people who aren’t, won’t do it,’’ he says.